Zany Action

Our Mouse Trap board game is a few years old, and in the past year it's been played quite a bit. I guess the kids love the zany action on the crazy contraption. Well who doesn't? It's also kind of adventurous because of the choking hazard. "Hey, where's the green man? Oh no, daddy is choking on it again!"

When you play the game out of the box for the first time, it's just amazing how the thing works so fluidly. All the parts perform their necessary function to make a complex and wicked cool mouse trap. The boot swings freely and precisely kicks the bucket, etc, etc. It's genius I tell you!

Well, after the game has been played a certain number of times, it really doesn't work so smoothly. Dylan was playing it this morning, and after he had it built the contraption worked something like this:

Turn the crank
The rubber band broke
Replace the rubber band with an elastic out of Andi's hair stuff
Turn the crank
Stop sign hits the boot
Boot swings around the pole, missing the bucket completely
Manually knock the bucket over with finger
Steel ball rolls down the ramp, gets stuck in a groove
Help ball continue down the ramp
Ball gets to the end of the ramp, but misses the hand pole because the ramp isn't set quite right any more
It's ok, because the other ball got lost, so the one ball has to be put at the top of the diving board.
Knock the ball from the diving board down into the bathtub
Balls gets stuck in the bathtub
Push the ball down the hole in the bathtub onto the diving board
Green man is knocked into tub (Hey, that part actually worked!)
Cage on top of the pole shimmies down onto the poor mouse
If the mouse were real, it could climb through one of the parts of the basket that is broken and has been re-taped several times
Feel the excitement!